You’ve painstakingly gathered your content, strategized with your team, hired an agency or designer and, over the course of weeks or months, invested time and money on a daily basis to launch your brand new business website.
Finally, your great looking, responsive and content rich website is live. So now what? Sit back and relax as your customers come pouring in!
Uhh. No.
The worst thing you can do now is to wait and hope that a magic stream of highly engaged, highly relevant traffic will come streaming in to your new website.
Don’t wait for business to come to you. After your website launch is you need to take action to ensure that all that precious time and money invested wasn’t in vain.
Here are 7 immediate & ongoing post-launch actions you need to take.
1. Measure what Matters
Your new website has a purpose. It serves a higher business objective of driving leads or sales, and more importantly, revenue, customer acquisition and long term lifetime value and reliable cash flow for your business.
You have to both identify and measure the online website events that produce those desired business outcomes.
It’s essential that you know where your customers are coming from, who they are, and how they’re converting so you can not only measure the impact of your brand new business website, but also the performance of all your online and offline marketing channels that are driving traffic.
2. Have an SEO plan and implement it
SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”. It refers to the strategy, tactics and action taken to ensure your website can be found for online searches, through search engines (like Google), for keywords that are relevant to your business.
Google uses A LOT of different metrics and signals when deciding (through their algorithms) where to rank websites for each search keyword. They rely both on your content, how your content is structured and organized and website technical performance (as well as local signals such as your business address on GMB, local website tagging, social media and more!)
3. Drive Traffic with Paid Advertising
Ever notice that writing a blog or adding content to your website doesn’t have an immediate impact on your volume of traffic? However, often when you review your page and post reports (we recommend Google Analytics!) you can see older posts driving more traffic.
This is because SEO efforts take time to kick in.
For this reason, we usually recommend supplementing a new website (or an existing website with low volume of traffic) with paid advertising. This will keep a reliable flow of traffic and leads coming to your website while you grow your organic presence.
Quite often you’ll also find it’s profitable to keep your paid campaigns running permanently even after you are getting a higher flow of organic free traffic as they can offer both an additional channel of predictable leads from your target audience AND a great deal of “free” data that you can use to help optimize your website and business.
4. Continually Optimize For Conversions
As mentioned above, a great side benefit of Paid Ads (sometimes called PPC and offered across multiple platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Youtube and more) is that you have a very detailed and targeted data set that’s chock-full of actionable intel you can use to test and improve your website.
You can analyze which landing pages, content & CTAs resonate best with each visitor location, demographic, device and even interests and search habits and optimize to improve your website experience.
You should be continuously analyzing and improving your website’s UX to boost your conversion rates (this is a practice known as Conversion Rate Optimization). It’s great to drive more traffic organically with SEO, but the next challenge is converting that traffic to a lead, and ultimately, a customer.
5. Don’t Get Hacked
There’s nothing worse than a surprise hacking to derail all your hard earned progress.
Website hacks not only leave you scrambling to get your website fixed and re-deployed, but can also stop marketing campaigns in their tracks, frustrate customers, mess up your SEO and even worse, compromise secure client information.
We recommend secure and monitored hosting and regular website maintenance to ensure your protected 24/7.
6. Delegate Efficiently
Chances are you’re an expert in your specific area of business and not SEO, Landing Page Development, Website Hosting, Google Ads, Analytics Configuration & Reporting, User Experience, Conversion Rate Optimization, Call Tracking etc.
You could spend months trying to learn any one of these topics efficiently, or you can delegate.
Take stock of the team and skill sets you have at your disposal and see what you can efficiently complete in house and what you should outsource.
At North Shore Digital we’ve worked hard to develop your Online Growth Plan that incorporates all these areas (and more). We also include ongoing consulting, insights and recommendations at a fraction of the price of a full time marketing coordinator or associate. Leave the online growth to us and focus on your business.
(end sales pitch).
7. The World is Changing – Fast
The world is changing and technology is accelerating faster and faster. Burying your head in the sand and hoping you’ll get leads, sales and customers the same way you did 10 years ago could have disastrous results for your business.
When did you last search Google for a new service close to where you live? Buy anything online recently?
The massive changes taking place due to the current Covid-19 pandemic have also created a shift in the way we work and our consumer habits, with more and more people researching, shopping and operating online.
At North Shore Digital we stay up to date, every day, with the latest online growth and marketing technologies, trends and innovations so you don’t have to.
